'I've told Melanie how things are now,' Stella said.
'Sure, that's okay.' Melanie was a close friend to both of them.
The indoor plants needed attention. Stella took off some of the dead leaves with her free hand. She didn't sit down as they talked, but roamed the small room with her mug of coffee close to her face for warmth. What do you tell friends? He thought with a pang of their own reaction to the differing separations of various acquaintances: the mixture of concern, curiosity and complacency. The apportioning of responsibility, and that fierce, but unacknowledged, relief that anyone's life but your own is shaken down. But then they were splitting; they were being shaken down.
He sensed that each of them was close to offering support to the other, yet knew that being together wouldn't work any more. And so they talked of offers on the house, and her father's health, as the room grew warmer and the winter day outside grew colder, the wind blowing the magpies past the birches and plum tree, and towing on long clouds with pale bellies, which glided like sharks in the sky.
Theo did a story once about a shark woman: an Australian of Italian descent who had lost most of her right thigh in an attack while swimming from a launch in Allot Bay. She said it was like being in a washing machine and that she felt the blood draining away from her heart. After that, like women lawyers who fall in love with the murderers they represent, her whole life became devoted to sharks: she wrote a thesis on their migratory patterns, did oceanic field work for a combined universities research team and featured in documentaries that sought to dispel fear and ignorance regarding the shark family. She was damn lucky to be alive. He interviewed her before a talk she gave at the Viaduct Basin, and she lifted her skirt so that the photographers could snap what was left of her thigh. Just bone and the great sunken scar, like the pursed mouth of an old man with no teeth. The shark had teeth all right, though. She must have been in her fifties by the time she came to Auckland, but she flipped her skirt up like a teenager to show the damage. She said the more you learn about the shark, the more you realise what a wonderful creature it is, so perfect in its adaptation to its role. She said there have been sharks for millions of years, long before the first ancestors of man.
The shock of the attack had led to a fixation, Theo reckoned. The trauma must have been so great that the only way she could deal with surviving the shark was to give the rest of her life to it.
4
'You'll end up antisocial,' said Nicholas. 'You need to watch that. You're going to end up a sad, old bore, talking shop endlessly, embellishing your potted stories and not wanting to go home after work.' It was a fear for himself, that he transferred to Theo. 'And you've got too focused on that Penny-farthing woman's court case. It doesn't pay to get emotionally involved with people you interview and write about. Your writing becomes partisan and sentimental, you know that. Cynicism is the whetstone of good journalism. You're not screwing her, are you?'
They were having coffee at their shared office window. The alley below was temporarily blocked by the van of a squat woman who was delivering bags of cat litter to the back of the pet shop. The inside of Theo's mug was stained to a tobacco brown, from having been rinsed only and put back amid the jumble of the draining tray. From farther back in the large reporters' room, where the overhead lights were always on and the hum of computers was a corporate tinnitus, came the snatches of talk among colleagues, and the more pronounced voices of those speaking on the phone, unconsciously compensating for distance.
Theo didn't need Nicholas to point out the narrowness of his life. 'I've invited you to come running with me, haven't I? At least I get a bit of bloody exercise.'
'Exercise doesn't count,' said Nicholas. 'That sort of exercise is mindless and atavistic. We don't have to outrun sabre-toothed tigers any more. Social interaction is the thing, some cultivation of the mind and the spirit.'
'Yeah, sure.'
'That's why I think we should go to that new massage parlour in Cargoe Street,' said Nicholas blithely.
'Ah, a cargo cult,' said Theo.
'I'm serious,' said Nicholas. 'It's the twenty-first century, for Christ's sake, Theo. We're single guys who work bloody hard. We'll be middle-aged soon. Jesus. If we don't watch it, in no time we'll be in carpet slippers and watering a Super Tom daily in a cloche behind the garage. We'll be supervising primary school road crossings, and spilling our self-pitying guts on late-night talkback radio. We'll be watching Coronation Street, and doing an extra-mural Massey course on post-colonial literature, or maybe taking minutes for the fucking Society for Sewage Pond Reform.'
'Yeah, but you're older than me,' said Theo.
Maybe Nicholas had a point, though: maybe it was a warning. Theo the sad-sack. Was that how they saw him? Theo looked about the reporters' room and tried to think of the last time he had laughed out loud at anything his colleagues said. So much of his time spent on failed relationships: writing and thinking about Penny with all her problems, and being reminded of Stella and his own marriage. One bag of cat litter had fallen and burst in the alley, and the squat woman drove the van away, leaving the pet shop man in a black apron to scoop up the pellets with a red plastic shovel. 'You know,' said Theo, 'a visit to the parlour sounds a bloody good idea, but don't you dare say anything to Melanie.'
The Cargoe Street premises were in a brick building with tight, orifice windows, above a shop selling photography equipment. 'They take the video footage straight downstairs to be processed,' quipped Nicholas. It was after eight, yet still fully light, and he and Theo stood at the massage parlour entrance. The brazen element to their pause there had more to do with an assumed insouciance than familiarity. 'I've been before. Credit cards are quite okay,' said Nicholas.
'Let's not split it down the middle, though,' said Theo.
The stairs were a straight, narrow ascent, and having reached the top, Theo and Nicholas found themselves facing an elderly man in shirtsleeves behind the desk of the small reception room. His considerable, bald head was in uneasy equilibrium on the thin stalk of neck, but his smile was assured. 'I'm standing in,' he said from his chair, realising that he was somewhat incongruous as the public face of the business. 'My daughter won't be a moment. It's just the change of shift, actually. Some of the girls going off, and a good many more coming on.'
'We'd prefer to be matched with the latter,' said Nicholas.
'Very good,' said the old guy with appreciation, and his smile widened. 'Reciprocality is important in massage.' The use of such a word, the slight twitch to his smile, were signs that he wasn't as out of touch with the business as he had seemed. 'Look,' he said, 'I'll just take you through, if you like, and then Alison will pop in and introduce one of the girls. The full body massage is ninety dollars.'
Behind the far door, the place opened up surprisingly, with a corridor well lit by recessed strips, and with five doors leading off on each side. Theo was given the second on the right. 'See you at the cars,' said Nicholas, 'but let's neither of us wait for more than fifteen minutes or so.'
Theo's room had an adjustable massage table, two straight-backed chrome chairs, a tiled floor and an ensuite of toilet, basin and shower. Everything was neat. If the padded massage table hadn't been there, the room could well have been a towel showroom. There were shelves of green towels beneath the one high window, more folded on the table, flannels and more towels, all green, padding out the ensuite. Theo sat and waited. He thought for a moment about giving up the idea: he hadn't sought sex in that way for a long time, but he became distracted by the towels, and was counting them when the woman came in.
It wasn't Alison, but Becky. Becky said Alison was still busy, but that it didn't matter, she, Becky, could do the talking as well as the massage, if that was okay with him. Becky was young and attractive enough. Sleek was the word that occurred to Theo. She was well rounded and had dark, shiny hair. Her skin was good, her arms and legs compact and close to her body. She wasn't beautiful at all, but had the sleekness of an otter, and the s
leekness of youth. And she was right at home.
'You know the basic full body massage is ninety bucks?' she said. The voice wasn't sleek; rather a retail counter voice, very forward in the mouth.
'What else is there?' said Theo. He had decided to be quite pragmatic about the whole business. Any sensitivity would only lead to awkwardness.
'Well, full sex is another hundred,' said Becky. 'Then there's the other forms of release for less. With me there's nothing anal, or any of that.'
'There's no bed in here,' said Theo. Becky was still standing with the closed door behind her, and Theo was sitting. It didn't feel right, but to stand up would be ridiculous.
'There's rooms on the other side of the corridor for that,' she said.
Theo decided to go with the massage for the time being. Becky told him to have a shower as hot as he could stand, then come out to the massage table with just a towel. 'Wrap it round you like a miniskirt,' she said. 'I'm just going to tell Alison we're underway.' She hadn't returned when Theo came back from his shower. He sat barefoot and bare chested on the massage table. It had a slight springiness. He lay on his back, but that was a strange feeling with no one else in the room, so he sat up again. Becky came back immediately afterwards. 'Sorry about that,' she said. 'Alison's dad needed help with the credit card machine. I don't know, he just doesn't seem to get it. Okay, lie down on your stomach.'
Theo had few sources of comparison, but Becky seemed to be good at massage. She had strong fingers and kneaded the muscles vigorously as well as making firm strokes. There was no obvious concentration on erogenous zones. The massage oil had a pleasant fragrance of the outdoors. She was interested in the profession of journalism, she said. Melanie's community paper came up and Becky said she didn't like it — all second-hand car ads, the miraculous return of pets and people overcoming disease. Theo didn't mention that the editor was a friend and occasional lover. Becky said what she liked was the travel pages. She'd been overseas once already and was saving for a trip to Portugal and Spain. She bent Theo's legs back so far that the cartilage popped. 'You've got a nice bum,' she said.
'I run a bit,' he said.
'The squash players I see almost all have great bums,' Becky said. 'It must be all that sudden change of direction that firms the muscles.' She gave his back a final rub down with yet another green towel, then asked him to turn over. Even though he was then cock up, Theo found it more natural to talk when he could see her face.
Becky wore a short-sleeved blouse, and her breast was close to him as she massaged. Theo was in a state of easy relaxation.
Becky was attractive and he wanted access to that without the hassle of close engagement. 'How about you massage me topless?' he said.
Becky didn't halt, or alter, the rhythm of her massage.
She was firmly stroking beneath his ribcage.
'Forty dollars,' she said. She wiped her hands, and took off her top with care: beneath it she wore a black, soft fabric bra. She undid it at the back, shrugged it off and began the massage again, without any inhibition, or pause for conscious display. She had nice tits, with dark areolae. As she massaged Theo, she allowed her nipples to glance his face, her flesh to briefly touch his own, but nothing was exaggerated in her movement; no honky-tonk titillation. 'Anything else?' she asked him.
'Nothing else,' said Theo.
He didn't need anything else, not even to lift his hands the short distance to touch her slanted breasts, or the sleek belly visible above her skirt. He just lay with eyes half closed and enjoyed the play of her hands on his flesh and bones, and movement of her naked torso. She talked about saunas, spa pools and massage. She had formal qualifications, she said, from the Athene Academy in Sydney, which was recognised worldwide.
'Why are there so many towels?' asked Theo, and Becky was for the first time mildly surprised.
'How do you mean?' she said.
'In here. So many towels everywhere.'
'We never use a towel more than once before it gets washed. That's a strict rule here. I reckon our rooms are cleaner than the homes the guys come from. Alison's a real stickler for it,' she said.
Theo made no argument of it.
He saw her once, weeks afterwards, in a mall. She was at a café table half in the thoroughfare with a woman about her own age. Theo paused close by, but Becky's unhurried glance showed no recognition. Sleekness would be replaced by bulk in middle age, he thought. He had a repressed inclination to say hello.
'Is there anything else?' she might have said, but instead she'd asked her friend why a certain Michelle was being such a bitch again.
Nicholas was waiting in his car. 'I was just about to go,' he said.
'You weren't long,' said Theo. 'I expected to be back first. I just had the regular massage, but topless — the woman I mean.'
Nicholas said he'd skipped the massage and gone straight over to one of the other rooms.
'Ah,' said Theo.
'It was both good and bad,' said Nicholas.
'You don't have to give me a blow by blow account,' said Theo, but Nicholas always enjoyed recounting such episodes in his life with a satirical gloss. The woman had continually talked about showtime, which Nicholas had found detrimental to performance. 'She kept saying, "Showtime, Nicholas" as we undressed, and before each manoeuvre, and I half expected her to crack a whip, or introduce a ring of miniature trotting ponies.' Whatever reservations he had about the session, Nicholas would make it work for him as a raconteur. Theo knew the tale would burgeon, and that he would hear it several times and so chart its growth. Experience was only the raw material of life for Nicholas, and subject to processing. 'And what about your woman?' he asked finally.
'Becky was bloody easy on the eye.' Theo felt a slight superiority in mentioning her name: a sign of his awareness of her apart from the transaction between them.
Nicholas had not mentioned any name at all throughout his account.
'Maybe I should have just had the massage.' Nicholas's tone was considered, rather than regretful. 'I was thinking before you came about our inability as a society to express ourselves about sex. It's so sought after, so compulsively essential, yet almost all our language concerning it is derogatory. To tell someone to get fucked should be to wish them great pleasure and fulfilment, but we mean the opposite.'
'I feel fine,' said Theo.
'Odd though, isn't it.'
It's just that you've become meditative after getting a shot away. Blood is slowly getting back to your brain.' 'Language is interesting, that's what I mean. It should be closer to experience.'
'Showtime, Nick,' said Theo. 'That's what you should concentrate on. Keeping all the balls in the air, managing a three ring circus. At your age you're lucky to manage any showtime, I'd say.'
5
Theo liked to run. At the end of the day at the paper, or early, before he began work. He ran down the cycle tracks that parallel the railway line through Papanui, and then into Hagley Park. The park has a changing exercise congregation. In the early mornings many are women with dogs: in the evenings there are more men, some with singlets bearing esoteric lettering. On winter mornings frost encourages a vigorous pace; on summer evenings mood and movement are more languorous. There are cyclists too, on the sealed paths through Hagley, some with leashed dogs which patter, or lope, according to their size and the speed of their owners.
He liked to run. As a young guy he had run to build fitness for other sports, and when he gave them up he continued the running. Journalism is a sedentary, stodgy career. Theo liked the perseverance of jogging, the sense of progress and the evasion it provided. You could concentrate on the physical endeavour for the duration of the run, and so keep at bay those things that gather about you when you're at rest. He ran a lot during the end of his marriage. When he was going through the divorce, Anna, who knew all about fitness, said how slim he was. He felt physically better that he had for years, though his life was crap, though he could laugh only at the misfortune of others, though
sometimes at the paper he went into the old photography room and stood alone in the dark there for minutes at a time.
It was after the visit to Drybread, and while Theo was running, that he first noticed the parson. He came later to call him that because he was bald and had an expression of compassionate resignation on his long face. Maybe what Penny had said about the police and her husband wanting to find her had remained with Theo; maybe it was the way the parson didn't look away when Theo became aware of his gaze at the traffic lights. Theo had seen him before, and the polished, maroon Honda Civic which had a bright chrome ball on its tow-bar and was trailing a rubber strap. Something to do with static electricity someone told Theo, which seemed odd, as rubber is a poor conductor. He crossed into the park and ran through the practice fairways of the golfcourse. For a minute or two he wondered where he'd seen the parson; whether he was new to the paper's clerical staff, or worked in a shop that Theo went to regularly. Although the guy looked like a parson, it was highly unlikely he was one — Theo didn't go to church, and wasn't on any ecclesiastical visiting list.
Theo saw him again a few days later as he reached home after work. Well, rather he saw the car, which was parked facing away on the opposite side of the street. The same high polish, same chrome ball on the tow-bar and trailing strap. SJ were the letters on the number plate before the numbers. Saviour Jesus perhaps. Theo couldn't see anyone in the car, and when he'd parked his Audi in the drive, he walked over and past the Honda. He visualised the parson crouched between the seats, ungainly, ignominious, and with a meek and sheepish face, but the car was empty. If he was nearby and watching, he'd realise Theo knew about him. Theo had no substantial debts, no ongoing dispute with Stella, he wasn't writing an expose on some tycoon: the parson was surely connected with the Maine-King custody case.
Drybread: A Novel Page 3